Some homes left in ruins, others remain untouched

SAN DIEGO -- It could have been a war movie set in suburbia.

At the entrance to a neighborhood in the city’s Rancho Bernardo area, a Hummer blocked the road and camouflage-clad National Guard troops were slinging M-16s.

Several hundred worried residents waited in line for as long as two hours, watching police escort their neighbors into the subdivision, one family at a time.

They were allowed back to their homes only to pick up prescription medications -- but their more urgent need was to know whether their homes still stood.

Upon returning, one woman said: “We have a house! The wall of our garage is gone, but we have a house.” She hugged a neighbor.

A few feet away, Juan Espana, a professor at National University, and his wife, Milena, sat on the curb talking with a crisis counselor. They had just come back from the ruins of their home and the one next door they rented out.

Sobbing softly, Milena, a psychologist, clutched a jagged piece of stucco -- a small reminder of what they had until flames engulfed the neighborhood in Monday’s early-morning darkness.

The scene Tuesday afternoon was replayed with sickening regularity throughout the besieged hot zones of Southern California.

In the Espanas’ Westwood subdivision, the ruins were still smoldering. In the span of just a few blocks, at least three dozen homes were destroyed; the number approached 300 in the entire Rancho Bernardo area, city officials said.

On a cul-de-sac called Corazon Place, all 11 homes were gone, replaced by mounds of twisted metal and smoking rubble. Brick chimneys poked up like Roman columns.

The only suggestions of normal life were sad ones -- a charred bicycle frame in a frontyard, an angel lawn statue knocked onto its back, a dead bird by the curb, burnt cars still in driveways with the tires melted off their rims.

Just down the street, Joe Fiore, 56, soot-stained and weary, was dumping debris from his yard into plastic garbage bags. An emergency room physician, he had been on his roof with a garden hose as the fire licked around the flanks of Battle Mountain, leaped Interstate 15 and roared into the neighborhood.

“I was so lucky,” he said. “I had a million embers flying at me. It was very, very, very scary.”

As he spoke, gas company workers ran metal detectors over the nearby steaming heaps that had until recently been homes, looking for lines to cut. Firefighters slowly patrolled the neighborhood, stopping to soak each smoking mound.

When embers stirred in a heavily damaged house, it erupted into flames again. A fire engine raced over and sent up a high arc of water, only to have the wind blow the stream away. From a ladder, a firefighter poked into a second-story window and started hosing down the interior.

“Man, this place got hit pretty hard,” said Capt. Arthur Jackson of the city Fire Department. “It’s amazing how fire selects which houses to take.”

Throughout the region, many people were struck by the same wonder at fire’s chilling randomness.

In the nearby hard-hit city of Poway, Don and Susan Buckley, both 49, sneaked into their exclusive Highlands Ranch neighborhood and trekked up a long hill past a locked gate to see whether their Mediterranean-style house had survived.

When she caught sight of its roof, Susan, a sales executive at an advertising firm, let out a deep sigh and exclaimed: “It’s there! Oh my God, we are so lucky.”

Walking hesitantly through their smashed-in wooden door, they saw that the flames had come within 10 yards of the house and had decimated four large homes up the hill.

On their kitchen counter were empty Gatorade bottles and energy-bar wrappers, and a note from the crew of San Diego Fire Engine 12, Lincoln Park.

“House saved,” it read. “Sorry about the door!”

joel.rubin@latimes.com

Times staff writers Steve Chawkins and Robert J. Lopez contributed to this report.